An ongoing tension is found in today's radiology environment between providing high-quality image review and maintaining adequate patient throughput to keep costs under control. Despite ongoing advances in imaging technology and related data processing systems, it is the radiologist who continues to bear the burden of the cost-quality tradeoff. As used herein, radiologist generically refers to a medical professional that analyzes medical images and makes clinical determinations therefrom, it being understood that such person might be titled differently, or might have differing qualifications, depending on the country or locality of their particular medical environment.
With the best of intentions, the medical imaging equipment industry continues to develop more technology to provide more image information and/or more decision support information to the radiologist for detecting and/or diagnosing a particular condition. However, especially in high-throughput environments such as x-ray mammography breast cancer screening environments, this additional information can sometimes frustrate the radiologist, already pressured by workload and cost considerations, by adding another layer of complexity to the process, and/or by presenting the additional information in awkward or non-intuitive user interfaces.
Even subtle user interface issues associated with image presentation tools and/or decision support tools can have a significant impact on the radiologist review rate and/or the quality of detection/diagnosis. One such user interface issue relates to patient worklists (i.e., case worklists) identifying the medical imaging cases to be presented to the radiologist at a radiography review workstation. Although some proposals have been made in relation to customization of patient worklists, such as those discussed in U.S. 2003/0126148 A1, which is incorporated by reference herein, it is believed that further improvements are needed. Other issues arise as would be apparent to one skilled in the art upon reading the present disclosure. It would be desirable to provide for enhanced radiologist insight into, and control over, patient worklists at a radiology review workstation.